The Black Book (18 page)

It’s not that I didn’t go at it, either: As if divining the configurations of stones standing on a dark-blue marble slab on which a game of draughts is played, I told myself, “The ‘me’ who stands leaning against the wall of the mosque desires to be him.” “The man wants to become at one with him whom he envies.” “On the other hand, ‘he’ pretends not to be aware that he’s been concocted by ‘me’ who impersonates him.” “That’s why the ‘eye’ is so self-assured.” “
He
seems not to know that the ‘eye’ has been created to make it possible for the man who leans up against the mosque wall to reach him, but the man who leans up against the wall is well aware of this vague apprehension.” “If the man makes a move to reach him and manages to become him, then the ‘eye’ would be left at an impasse or else in a lacuna.” “Besides, what’s more…” Etc., etc.

Those were the things on my mind as I observed myself from the outside. Then the “I” which I observed began walking home to his own bed along the wall of the mosque and, when the wall came to an end, along the wooden houses with the enclosed balconies that duplicated each other, along past vacant lots, public fountains, past zipped-up stores and the graveyards.

I was constantly astonished as I observed myself, the way we are startled when, walking along a crowded street and glancing at the impressions of people going by, we suddenly catch ourselves in a plate glass window or in a huge mirror behind a row of mannequins. But, simultaneously, I knew it was not astonishing that this “I” that I observed as if in a dream was nobody besides myself. What astonished me was the unbelievably gentle, sweet, and loving affinity I felt for this person. I knew how fragile and pitiful he really was, how helpless and sad. I was the only one who knew this person was not what he seemed; I wanted to protect this touchy kid, this creature, as if I were his father, or even a god, and take him under my wing. But he kept walking on for a long time (What was he thinking of? Why so sad, so tired and defeated?), and he finally arrived on the main street. Occasionally, he looked into the unlit windows of pudding shops and grocery stores. He’d thrust his hands into his pockets. Then, his chin fell on his chest. He walked on from Şehzadebaşı to Unkapanı without paying any attention to the occasional vehicle or the vacant taxi that zoomed by. Perhaps he didn’t have any money on him either.

Walking on the Unkapanı bridge, he momentarily glanced at the Golden Horn. In the dark, a barely visible crew was pulling on a rope tied to the long and slim stack of a tugboat which was set to sail under the bridge. Walking up Şişhane hill, he exchanged a few words with a drunk who was coming down the street; he paid no attention to the well-lit windows on İstiklâl Avenue, except one, a silversmith’s display which he studied thoroughly. What was on his mind? Watching him with nervous apprehension and affection, I was anxious for him.

At Taksim, he bought some cigarettes and matches at a stand. He opened the pack with the lingering gestures characteristic of the sorry Turk in the street, and he lit a cigarette: Oh, the sad wisp of smoke that curled out of his mouth! I was a know-it-all, I recognized everything and had a great deal of experience, but I was fearfully anxious as if I were face-to-face with a human being’s existence for the first time. I wanted to say, “Watch it, kid!” Every time he crossed a street, I was thankful that he hadn’t met up with something dreadful, seeing how I kept reading the signs of some calamity lurking in the street, the dark façades of the apartment buildings, and in the unlit windows.

Thank goodness, he managed to get home safely, at a Nişantaşı apartment building (Heart-of-the-City Apartments). Once up in his attic flat, you’d think he’d take his troubles to bed, the same troubles I wanted to understand and alleviate. But no, he sat down in a chair, began smoking and going through the daily papers for a while. Then he paced up and down among the old furniture, the dilapidated table, the faded drapes, all the papers and books. Suddenly he sat down at the table, squirmed on the squeaky chair and, grabbing a pen, he leaned over a clean sheet of paper to write something.

I stood immediately next to him; I felt as if I were on top of his messy table. I observed him close up: He wrote with a childlike concentration, with the unruffled pleasure of watching a favorite film, but introspectively. I watched him, proud as a father observing his son pen his first letter. He pursed his lips together when he reached the end of his sentences, his eye bobbled along the paper with the same speed as the words. When he filled up the entire page, I read what he’d been writing, and I shuddered with a deep ache.

He hadn’t managed to quote from his own soul, with which I was dying to acquaint myself, but had only scripted the sentences you’ve been reading. It wasn’t his world, but mine, not his words, but the very words across which you’re speeding now (slow down, please!), which belonged to me. I wanted to stand up to him and demand that he write his own words, but I could do nothing but watch him as in a dream. The words and sentences followed each other, each one causing me further pain.

At the beginning of a new paragraph he paused for a bit. He looked at me—as if he saw me, as if our eyes met! Remember the scenes in old books and magazines where the writer and his muse have an agreeable chat? Playful illustrators depict in the margin the sweet muse, who is no larger than a pen, and the absentminded writer smiling at each other. Well, that’s the smile we gave each other. Now that we’d given each other smiles of empathy, I assumed, optimistically, that everything would be illumined. He would become aware of what’s what, write the stories out of his own world for which I had so much curiosity, and I’d read his opinions on being himself with great pleasure.

Nice try! But nothing. Zilch. He shot another beatific smile at me, as if all that needed clarification were clear as a bell; he paused, emotionally worked up as if he’d solved a problem in a game of checkers, and wrote the final words that plunged my world into an impenetrable darkness.

Chapter Eleven

WE LOST OUR MEMORIES AT THE MOVIES

The movies not only ruin a child’s eyesight; they ruin his mind.

—
ULUNAY

As soon as Galip woke up, he knew it had snowed again. Perhaps he’d known it in his sleep; he’d sensed silence envelop city noises in the dream he remembered upon waking but lost instantly when he looked out the window. It had been dark for quite some time. Galip bathed in the water the gas heater never quite warmed and then got dressed. He took paper and pen to the table, sat down, and worked on the clues for a while. He shaved, put on the herringbone jacket Rüya liked, which was identical to the one Jelal wore, and over it he put on his thick and coarse winter coat.

It had stopped snowing. A couple of inches of the stuff covered the parked cars and the sidewalks. Saturday-evening shoppers with packages in their hands walked home gingerly, as if stepping on the spongy surface of an alien planet they were just getting used to walking on.

At Nişantaşı Square, he felt pleased that the main thoroughfare was clear. He pulled a copy of the next morning’s
Milliyet
out of the stack of girlie and scandal magazines on the stand, which was set up in the entryway of a grocery store, as it usually was at night. He walked over to the restaurant across the street, sat in a corner that couldn’t be seen by the pedestrians, and ordered tomato soup and grilled
köftes.
While he waited for the food, he placed the paper on the table and read Jelal’s Sunday column carefully.

The piece was one of those that had first appeared many years ago; reading it now for the second time, Galip had memories of some of Jelal’s individual sentences, which related to memory. While he drank his coffee, he marked the text. Upon leaving the restaurant, he hailed a taxi to take him to Sinan Paşa in the suburb of Bakırköy.

On the protracted taxi ride, Galip felt as if he were not in Istanbul but in some other city, seeing the sights. Where Gümüşsuyu Ramp slopes into Dolmabahçe, three municipal buses had plowed into each other and a crowd had gathered around them. There was absolutely nobody at the bus and
dolmuş
stops. Snow had descended on the city like some kind of oppression, the street lights had grown dimmer, the nighttime activity which makes a city into a city had stopped, and it had regressed to a blank medieval night where the doors are closed and the sidewalks deserted. The snow on the domes of the mosques, on the warehouses, and on the squatter’s shacks was not white but blue. He saw whores with purple lips and blue faces hanging about in Aksaray, youngsters sliding down along the city walls on wooden ladders used as sleds, the revolving blue lights of the squad cars parked by the terminal where the buses took off carrying passengers who looked out fearfully. The elderly taxi driver told a dubious story relating to an implausible winter long ago when the Golden Horn froze over. Working in the taxi’s top light, Galip marked Jelal’s column all over with numbers, signs, and letters, but he still didn’t get anywhere. When the driver protested that he could drive no further, Galip got off at Sinan Paşa and walked.

Sunny Heights was closer to the main street than he’d remembered. The road, which ran along two-story concrete-block houses (upgraded from squatter’s shacks) with their curtains drawn shut, and along store windows which showed no light, went up a slight slope and suddenly came to a halt at a small square where the bust of Atatürk stood (it wasn’t a statue after all) that was represented by the oblong sign he’d seen in the City Directory that morning. Counting on his memory, he took a street off the fair-sized mosque, which had political slogans written all over its walls.

He didn’t even want to imagine Rüya in one of these houses where the stovepipes poked out of the middle of the windows, where some of the balconies sloped slightly downwards; but ten years ago he’d quietly approached the open windows, seen for himself what he didn’t even want to imagine, and beat a hasty retreat. On that hot August evening, Rüya sat in a sleeveless cotton print dress, working at the table piled with papers, and twirled a curl in her hair round and round; her husband, who sat with his back turned to the window, was stirring his tea; and the moth which was soon to get zapped went in less and less orderly circles around and around the bare bulb that hung overhead. On the table between the husband and wife there was a plate of figs and a mosquito spray. Galip recalled perfectly the tinkle of the spoon in the teacup and the chirr of the cicadas in the bushes nearby, but he could fetch up no associations with the corner where he saw the sign on the post half buried in the snow: Refet Bey Street.

He walked down and back the full length of the street, where kids were throwing snowballs at one end and at the other a lamp illuminated a movie poster showing a nondescript woman whose eyes had been blocked out, blinded. All the houses had two stories and none had any numbers on the doors, so he went by them the first time being nonchalantly forgetful. The second time, though, he reluctantly remembered the window, the door handle he was loath to touch ten years ago, and the dull, unplastered walls. Another floor had been added. A garden wall had been built. And concrete had replaced the mud yard. The first floor was in pitch darkness. The bluish light of a TV screen filtered through the closed curtains on the second floor, which had a separate entrance, and a sulphur-yellow fume of lignite coal smoked out of the stovepipe which stuck out of the wall into the street like the barrel of a gun, announcing the good news that an unexpected guest who knocked on the door would find here something hot to eat, a warm hearth, and warmhearted people watching TV like dummies.

Galip went up the snow-covered steps cautiously, accompanied by the foreboding barks of the dog in the next yard. “I won’t take too much time talking to Rüya!” Galip said to himself, but he wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to himself or to the ex-husband in his imagination. He’d request that she explain the reasons she hadn’t divulged in the goodbye letter, then he’d ask her to come as soon as possible and get all her stuff, her books, cigarettes, the odd pairs of stockings, the empty pill bottles, her bobby pins, the cases for all her prescription glasses, the half-eaten chocolates, her barrettes, the wooden ducklings that were her childhood toys; and be gone. “Anything that reminds me of you gives me more pain than I can bear.” Since he couldn’t say all this in front of the guy, he’d best convince Rüya to go somewhere to sit down and talk “like adults.” Once they went to this place and the subject of “adults” came up, it was possible to convince Rüya of other things as well; but how was he to find such a spot in this place where there was nowhere to go aside from all-male coffeehouses?

When Galip heard a child’s voice first (Mom, the door!) and then a woman’s voice which was in no way anything like his wife’s, his sweetheart for twenty years and his friend for more than that, he knew how stupid he’d been to come here to find Rüya. For a moment he thought he’d beat it, but the door was already open. Galip recognized the ex-husband immediately, but the ex didn’t recognize Galip. He was of an average age and of average height; he was just like what Galip had imagined and was also someone Galip would never imagine again.

While the ex-husband got his eyes accustomed to the darkness of the dangerous world outside, and Galip waited to grant the man enough time to recognize him, the inquisitive heads of first the wife, next a child, next another child, appeared one by one: “Who is it, Dad?” Dad, already stuck for an answer, was bewildered for the moment. And Galip, having decided this was his chance to escape without having to go inside, gave his account all in one breath.

He was sorry he was disturbing them in the middle of the night, but he was in a real tight spot; he was here at their home, where he’d come again for a friendly visit some other time (with Rüya even), to get information on an extremely pressing problem concerning a person, or a name. He was defending a university student accused of a murder he hadn’t committed. No, it wasn’t as if there weren’t a dead party, but the real murderer who went around the city like a ghost was at one time …